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(More customer reviews)With the partitions and the Nazi and Soviet occupations, no other European nation has suffered as Poland has, which makes it extremely difficult for Polish Catholics to admit to any malevolence of their own.
Polish monarchs welcomed Western Europe's Jews to Poland in the Middle Ages but this was not for altruistic reasons. The nobility desperately needed the Jews' acumen in finance and trade. Over the centuries, anti-Jewish sentiment grew in Poland, fueled by economic rivalry and the Polish Catholic Church.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a growing number of Poles envisioned an independent Poland whose citizens would be exclusively ethnic Polish and Catholic. This "Poland for Poles" ethno-nationalism, spearheaded by Roman Dmowski and his National Democratic Party, tapped into centuries-old, popular anti-Jewish sentiment. By the 1930's, anti-Semitism was not only prevalent among the masses, it was becoming increasingly institutionalized throughout independent Poland.
There were boycotts of Jewish businesses, restrictions on Jews attending university, segregation of Jews in classrooms, increasing Catholic-on-Jew violence, restrictions on Jewish religious practices passed into law, discussions of deportations, hiring and promotion restrictions in the public sector, etc.
Michlic ably examines the rise of institutionalized anti-Semitism in Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries. There can be no arguing with the extremely well-researched contents of her presentation. This book would be quite an education for Polish and Polish American conservatives, who deny anti-Semitism most zealously, and hold to it most dearly.
The editor of a Polish American weekly recently proclaimed that "Poles are not anti-Semitic" (Am-Pol Eagle, 4/8/2010), pointing to the thousands of Polish Catholics who participated in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. The ignorance of this argument is beyond comprehension although it is widely disseminated throughout Polonia, even by academics who should know better. It's quite obvious that anyone who holds to this opinion has an extremely parochial understanding of Polish history, 1918-1945.
Polish chauvinists constantly point to the fact that Poland leads other former Nazi-occupied countries in the number of Righteous Among Nations awarded by Yad Vashem (6195 as of 6/12/10) without acknowledging that half of Europe's Jews lived in the country at the beginning of the Second World War. In reply to Poles who purposely misinterpret the number of Righteous by country for their own purposes, Yad Vashem states on its website, "The number of rescuers in the different countries depends on a multitude of factors and therefore does not necessarily indicate the attitude of the local population to the Jews and their murder. Moreover, in view of the great difference in circumstances between different countries and regions, one should proceed with great caution when making such comparisons."
Click Here to see more reviews about: Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present
In this provocative and insightful book, Joanna Beata Michlic interrogates the myth of the Jew as Poland's foremost internal “threatening other,” harmful to Poland, its people, and to all aspects of its national life. This is the first attempt to chart new theoretical directions in the study of Polish-Jewish relations in the wake of the controversy over Jan Gross’s book Neighbors. Michlic analyzes the nature and impact of anti-Jewish prejudices on modern Polish society and culture, tracing the history of the concept of the Jew as the threatening other and its role in the formation and development of modern Polish national identity based on the matrix of exclusivist ethnic nationalism. In the late nineteenth century and throughout the greater part of the twentieth, exclusivist ethnic nationalism predominated over inclusive civic nationalism in Polish political culture and society. Only in the aftermath of the political transformation of 1989 has Polish civic nationalism gradually gained predominance. As civic nationalism has become more assertive, Polish scholars have begun to unearth and critically examine the legacies of Polish anti-Semitism and other anti-minority prejudices. Michlic conducted extensive research in Polish, British, and Israeli archives for this book. Poland’s Threatening Other contributes to modern Jewish and Polish history, the study of nationalism, and to a new school of critical inquiry into the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices. Download a list of textual corrections (PDF) here.
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